xation, the rise in wages to meet high prices, and the
lethargy of the workers. Ruin, immense, engulfing, annihilating to our
strength as a nation and as an empire, stares us brutally in the eyes
at the time I write this book, and I find no consolation in the thought
that other nations in Europe, including the German people, are in the
same desperate plight, or worse.

IX

The nation, so far, has not found a remedy for the evil that has
overtaken us. Rather in a kind of madness that is not without a strange
splendor, like a ship that goes down with drums beating and banners
flying, we are racing toward the rocks. At this time, when we are
sorely stricken and in dire poverty and debt, we have extended the
responsibilities of empire and of world--power as though we had
illimitable wealth. Our sphere of influence includes Persia, Thibet,
Arabia, Palestine, Egypt--a vast part of the Mohammedan world. Yet if
any part of our possessions were to break into revolt or raise a "holy
war" against us, we should be hard pressed for men to uphold our power
and prestige, and our treasury would be called upon in vain for gold.
After the war which was to crush militarism the air force alone proposed
an annual expenditure of more than twice as much money as the whole cost
of the army before the war. While the armaments of the German people,
whom we defeated in the war against militarism, are restricted to a few
warships and a navy of 100,000 men at a cost reckoned as L10,000,000
a year, we are threatened with a naval and military program costing
L300,000,000 a year. Was it for this our men fought? Was it to establish
a new imperialism upheld by the power of guns that 900,000 boys of ours
died in the war of liberation? I know it was otherwise. There are people
at the street-corners who know; and in the tram-cars and factories
and little houses in mean streets where there are empty chairs and the
portraits of dead boys.

It will go hard with the government of England if it plays a grandiose
drama before hostile spectators who refuse to take part in it. It will
go hard with the nation, for it will be engulfed in anarchy.

At the present time, in this August of 1919, when I write these words,
five years after another August, this England of ours, this England
which I love because its history is in my soul and its blood is in my
body, and I have seen the glory of its spirit, is sick, nigh unto death.
Only great physicians may heal